Thoughts on using a CDN?
-
I'm trying to decide if I should use a CDN to speed up my site. I've never used one before, but I do know that there are a lot of images on my site and I think that could help a great deal.
Are they hard to set up? Are there any down sides? And are the pricey?
Also I'm not sure even sure if it would make a difference for me, but I want to work on getting my site faster.
Thanks.
-
This in no way endorses or not any one cdn but I will share what has happened to me over the last few months.
My hosting company gave me the option of using a well known cdn free with my hosting package. Now as my site is hosted in the US and most of my visitors are from the UK I thought that would be a good idea. So end of August I enable the cdn for my site.
From mid sept the time it took googlebot to crawl an individual page on my site went up from average 150ms to over 4000ms. The number of pages crawled per day remain the same.
However looking at the index status the number of pages not selected has increase by some 30% when I have not been adding any content to the site.
At end of Sept for most of my page my ranking fell by about 950 places. There were no messages in WMT and a reconderation request came back saying no manual penalty.
At the end of Oct I disable the CDN and immeadiately the time googlebot took on each page fell back down to the 150ms mark. Rankings are yet to improve so I am not saying this was the only cause of the drop in rankings.
I am now getting a lot of 404 not found appearing in my wmt crawl errors for pages that have never exisited on my site but have no mention of the cdn in them either.
I am talking with the cdn provider at the moment so have not named them here.
-
Hi, I work at Incapsula and I've just recently wrote a 2 part Blog Post that look and CDN from a SEO point-of-view. The first post deals with SEO & CDN Myths and the second one covered CDN related SEO Benefits. I hope you`ll find this helpful.
Admittedly, I do work for a CDN provider, but I also have 7+ year of prior SEO experience (both as Freelancer, Senior Adviser, CTO and SEO/SEM Department Manager) and so, in my post, I insisted on conduction balanced discussion, using only Google official statements to prove my point.
Hope this helps.
-
I've just signed upto http://www.incapsula.com/
It was the most pain free setup compared to another I have tried.
They have various versions available. Also stopped all my spam registrations!
-
i used amazon cdn and was not impressed with the service but i have been told there are some good ones out there, it is just finding the good ones.
-
No problem. Be sure to let me know if you end up trying one.
-
I was suspicious that it might cause a rankings problem. Thanks for sharing what you read.
I would like to read an evaluation of the service done by a top SEO with deep technical knowledge. What happens when you start bouncing every visitor from a high traffic country? Will I lose image search traffic when my files are modified out to their service? What else do they add to my site or change? Sucking any linkjuice?
-
Yah, I read up on CloudFrare, but it looks like a lot of people don't like them / suggest them. Some people even saying they lost a lot of rankings after using them.
-
I was looking at CloudFlare.
I wanted to speed up the site, limit access to certain countries, and get some of their security enhancements.
The cost can be free if you use minimal services or $20/month if you want a lot more.
I didn't do it because I had some concerns about their use of my data, how they might rewrite URLs on my site with affiliate codes, how blocking certain countries might impact search rankings, and more.
I really like their services but have research to do before I decide that it is a good thing for me.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Web Hosting and CDN for Wordpress Site Load Speed - Suggestions Needed
We all know that website load speed is more important than ever. While I love the look and feel of parallax and Wordpress, I want to do everything I can to keep the load speed down. I see a lot of conflicting information regarding web hosting services, CDN services and other service (Cloudflare for example). I am looking to hear from those with their own experiences to let me know what they think is the ideal setup for a parallax Wordpress site is as far as which services to use, including: 1. Web Hosting
Web Design | | Gauge123
2. CDN
3. Any other service or product that would help to provide and extremely fast site load time. Thank you!0 -
Best SSL Certificate to Use
I am setting up an ecommerce website that will sell batteries and like most e-commerce sites we will be taking credit cards. I was exploring the different SSL certificates and providers and I was shocked at the difference in pricing. Anywhere from free to over $1000! What is really necessary and what is nice to have? Any suggestions on SSL providers? Thanks
Web Design | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Is there any negative SEO effect when using Wordpress for your Blog?
I have a site entirely done in html, no CMS used. The blog page however, is wordpress. Wondering if this will effect us negatively in terms of SEO, having the blog that is linked to our site, a wordpress site. My gut is absolutely not, but the questions was asked....what do you think?
Web Design | | cschwartzel0 -
Using More Info javascript:toggleDisplay tag for More info text
Is there any harm in using javascript so a user can "toggle" open or closed additional text on a website? For example, if a user wants to read more about something, they can click on "More Info" and the text would then appear. Google is able to read the text, because I chose a random 8 word section of the text within the More Info and pasted it into a Google Search and the website showed up in search results. Just wondering if using this technique would have any negative impact. Here's what the code would look like:
Web Design | | EEE3
<a <span="">title</a><a <span="">="Show Tables" href="</a><a class=" " target="_blank">javascript:toggleDisplay('table1')</a>">More Info style="display: none;" id="table1"> this is where the text would be, and from this section was where I grabbed text to search with in google. Then in the footer, here is the script needed so the more info will work: I am by no means an expert in coding/html/javascript. Thanks!0 -
Using H1 Headings - More than 1?
I've known about avoiding the use of more than 1 H1 Heading Tags, however, with HTML5 is this going to change... at least that's how I understand it. According to HTML5 Specs, Each 'section' can have an H1 heading, which at least theoretically means certain web pages that have multiple "sectioning elements" can have more than 1 H1 heading... true? False? What I'm looking for here is some insight into the ramifications HTML5 will have on the use of H1 tags. And would like to know how search engines currently handle this and are they anticipated to change as the HTML5 outline algorithm becomes widely supported? thanks in advance Kelly
Web Design | | KellysTutorials0 -
Examples of e-commerce sites using ajax faceted navigation?
Does anyone have examples of e-commerce sites successfully using ajax to power faceted navigation?
Web Design | | ao.com0 -
How to serve a Mobile & Full Site using one URL?
Hello, Does anyone know of any resources or tutorials that outline how to serve a smartphone-formatted website using the same URL as the full site? I know that one solution is using media-queries to serve a seperate CSS stylesheet, but you still have the full HTML source code. In other words, I might want to serve a smartphone & desktop user different content, but under one URL. WP Touch (Wordpress Plugin) is a perfect example of what I mean, but how is it technically achieved? It serves two different sets of HTML for smartphone & full, but using one URL http://www.bravenewcode.com/store/plugins/wptouch-pro/
Web Design | | petecampbell-bmi0